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February 10th, 2012 robin Posted in Reviews | Comments Off on Moving to Shotwell

I just spent a few days getting my old media archives in order.

I’ve previously used F-Spot for managing my photos, and errr… folders for videos. Unfortunately F-Spot development seems to be stagnating, and I’m not too impressed with the performance and frequency of crashes…
Sooo I opened up Shotwell (the (not so) new default photo manager on Ubuntu), and proceeded to import all my photos. I can’t say it went without a hitch – I had to fiddle around with a few batches of photos which got tags I never defined hooked on them in a way Shotwell wouldn’t remove, and some other tags just dissapeared altogether… but all in all the effort for migrating ~25k photos was acceptable, and the end result: Shotwell is pretty sweet!
Shotwell is soooo much faster and responsive than F-Spot, and I love the way that any enhancements you make on a picture (cropping, colour/hue adjustment etc.) are stored as transformations in the database, and only applied to exported pictures – the original image data remains untouched. The F-Spot solution to this was to create Modified versions, but that always bugged me having so many versions of the same file hanging around, and progressive loss of quality…
Also I love that tagging in Shotwell is much faster than in F-Spot (for a keyboard junkie like me): [ctrl]-t, and type in (auto-complete) a list of tags.
For video editing (I recently got a camcorder) I tried out Kino (no development in last year and a half, and working with .MOD files was a pain) and Cinalerra (horrible GUI…) but ended up settling for OpenShot, and while it probably can’t be considered a fully fledged video editor, it’s more than enough for my needs, and pretty intuitive.

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